Rainbow Rowell | Eleanor & Park

Two misfits.One extraordinary love.Eleanor... Red hair, wrong clothes. Standing behind him until he turns his head. Lying beside him until he wakes up. Making everyone else seem drabber and flatter and never good enough...Eleanor.Park... He knows she'll love a song before he plays it for her. He laughs at her jokes before she ever gets to the punch line. There's a place on his chest, just below his throat, that makes her want to keep promises...Park.Set over the course of one school year, this is the story of two star-crossed sixteen-year-olds—smart enough to know that first love almost never lasts, but brave and desperate enough to try.

First Few Lines:
He'd stopped trying to bring ker back. She only came back when she felt like it, in dreams and lies and broken deja vu. Like, he'd be driving to work, and he'd see a girl with red hair standing on the corner - and he'd swear, for half a choking moment, that it was her.

Thoughts On The Book:
A new girl, bullied because she's overweight and dresses in a flamboyant manner. A half-Korean boy who has lived in Omaha, Nebraska, all his life but still feels like an outsider. Eleanor & Park is a story of first love. And it gives you that -how it's almost always intense and heart-breakingly doomed, how you feel desperate and hopeless and wildly hopeful all at the same time- kind of love. It slowly builds from the first day Eleanor sits next to Park on the school bus. First they ignore each other, and then they slowly become friends through their common interest of comic books, and music. She is only good thing in his life, and it reminds me how it is to be young, and in love. It is a funny and sad, sarcastic and sincere, and above all geeky read.